January 15, 2015

If your business is a consumer of technology services, whether regular or occasional, you've probably researched the case studies and demos of the solutions that your services provider has implemented for other clients. If these haven't been readily available, you've probably asked to see examples of solutions they've created for companies that are like your own, and if the services provider can't provide at least a screenshot or tell the story of a relevant solution, you may have started evaluating other vendors.

These are the most common questions I hear from Sales: "Where have we done [x] before? What have we done for the [x] industry?" Prospects and existing clients want us to show our work, and to provide evidence that we have the necessary experience to take on their project - whether it's via case studies, testimonials, or demos.

What's surprising to me is that in all my years of technical presales, I’ve rarely heard a prospect ask for a demo of my own company’s collaboration tools and systems. There are plenty of resources online for what to ask a tech services provider - mostly around what level of support they provide, what security and data recovery plans they have in place to protect your data, and whether they serve similar clients. But how your tech services provider runs its own business may be even more significant to your project's success than the work they've done for others like you.

So if you're evaluating a technology services firm, or already engaged with one, here are some questions you may want to ask:

- What tools do your teams use to collaborate? What percentage of your staff uses them?

- What tools do you use to collaborate with your clients and partners?

- What systems do you use to run the business? - for example, Accounting, Sales, HR, Recruiting. (They probably have a time tracking and invoicing system that works well, same for their customer relationship database and customer support, but it's likely they have focused less on the systems that don't directly affect the bottom line)

- Are your most important systems integrated? (Just like you, they may be struggling with multiple systems of record, where account and project data is duplicated across systems.)

- What percentage of your business runs in the Cloud?

- Do you have a technology roadmap for your business? (& can I see it?)

- Do all employees have standard virus protection installed on their devices?

- How often do you upgrade employees' hardware?

- What's your Disaster Recovery Plan? (& can I see it?)

- What kind of workflow automation have you implemented to manage your own processes, for example Expenses, Onboarding, Paid Time Off Requests, etc? How well are they adopted?

- How do you manage and track your IP?

- What sort of processes and technology have you implemented to support your mobile workforce?

- How is the time and expense entry experience for your Delivery staff, especially on a mobile device?

If the vendor you're evaluating gives you the old "cobbler's kids have no shoes" excuse, (i.e. they're so focused on their clients that they de-prioritize their own systems) or any combination of that plus "we're upgrading our systems now" or "we can't show you that due to client confidentiality," you may want to expand your search.

January 06, 2015

Just before the holidays I got a call that reminded me how much I love my business. The call was from a client I'd last worked with in 2008 or 2009 - for each of us, that was two companies ago. The most we'd done to keep in touch during the intervening time was to remain first level connections on LinkedIn. Now this person was calling me (having kept track of my cell number, which I don't publish on LI) with a new SharePoint opportunity. Can I help? Absolutely.

This is the magic of being in Professional Services - the people you work with, the relationships you make. It was great to catch up with my former client. My "aha" moment from this call, though, was the reminder of the longevity these relationships can have. Throughout my consulting career I've received a lot of repeat business, but this was definitely the longest time interval I've seen between last contact and new opportunity.

The insight for technology consulting leaders is that every single person in your organization has these relationships, and they're the key to your business. Repeatedly I've seen how tech firms operate on the assumption that these relationships are primarily held and maintained by the executives, Sales, and the practice directors (consider, for example, who in the organization gets one of those precious licenses to CRM or SalesForce). They view the value of their Delivery staff as their expertise and their utilization. But the truth is that clients place the most value on the consultant or team who is solving their problems on a daily basis. Those are the folks they will be calling again in five years - not the salesperson.

With this in mind, here are three ways technology consulting firms can take a lesson from our fellow Professional Services practitioners, and rev up the power of our individuals:

Technologists get excited about solving problems. They want to make sure that their clients and prospects know about the solutions and the technologies they offer. But the solutions aren't the company's product. The people are. Instead of promoting the latest Marketing campaign or trendiest service on your home page, the people should be front and center. They are what your client is actually buying.

At every tech consulting firm where I've worked, there has been push-back about listing all the consultants on the company website. Either there's a fear that it makes competitors' recruiters' jobs too easy (which LinkedIn has now rendered irrelevant), or it's too much effort to maintain all those profiles (so we'll only show the leadership team), or not every consultant is "worthy" of being listed (because some are not active thought leaders in the community), or the listing of all exposes some perceived weakness at the firm (there's not enough diversity when you view them all together).

Since 2006 I've been challenging these reasons and risks because they don't outweigh the benefit that promotion of individuals has on the business. We now know that a prospective client is nearly 60% of their way through the decision-making process (researching, benchmarking, ranking their options) before they reach out to Sales. Doesn't it seem likely that if you're selling expert services, your prospects will want to take a look at the backgrounds and credentials of your people? (This is true from a Recruiting perspective as well - candidates want to "meet" the people on your team, and they'll be impressed if your firm thinks enough of each consultant to showcase them individually.)

The promotion of individuals is something our Professional Services cousins, the law firms, inherently understand. Go to the website of any of the top US firms - you'll find a complete directory of their lawyers / attorneys, from associates to partners, viewable by filtering or by alphabetical order, with each lawyer's phone number and email address readily available. They do this because it drives business. Why shouldn't tech consultancies do the same?

Tech firms invest a lot in outreach to their prospects, clients, and partners, but in my experience, not to alumni. Why not? If one of your consultants moves on, they're still a valuable member of your network. They may have gone native, in which case there's a good chance their new company needs your services. They may have found that the grass isn't greener at their new gig, and would be open to coming back. They may recommend your services to people in their own network. There are plenty of compelling reasons to invest in your alums.

Here's an area where the management consulting firms really shine. In my benchmarking of the top strategy / management consulting firms' websites, I found that while they tend to be more artful about promoting their individuals (often a Recruiting-oriented selection of "featured employees" rather than the whole roster, sometimes with first names only, and typically buried a few layers down in the navigation), their alumni resources are front and center, without fail. There's typically a secure component that requires login, alongside some promotion of prominent alumni in the news, always accompanied by the messaging that the firm wants their alumni to stay connected and stay in touch.

Most of these firms offer IT strategy consulting, so if you are a technology consultant attached to a broader consulting firm, you'll have access to an alumni network. Beyond that it's difficult to find a dedicated tech services firm that offers one. Tech consulting firms get hired to build these alumni sites, so creating one for their own people should be a no-brainer. Investing in some dedicated alumni resources, even minimally, such as with a monthly newsletter, could have a positive impact on business and recruiting.

Many tech firms have an Inside Sales role that handles telemarketing and initial lead development. What if there were a person at the firm dedicated to meeting one-on-one with every employee, on a regular basis (say, twice a year), to gather the following information:

Is there anyone in your network who might need our services?

Do we have your current project contacts in our relationship database? On our mailing list(s)?

Do you see any opportunities at your client beyond the project you're currently working on?

Would any of your current project contacts be willing to do a case study? Give us a testimonial quote? Participate in a quick video interview for our website? etc.

Should the project(s) you're working on be nominated for an award? (provide a list of potential design and technology awards, such as the Nielsen Norman Group 10 Best Intranets)

Should the client you're working with be nominated for an award? (provide a list of potential entrepreneur and leadership awards, and even develop your own - more about this in a future post)

We're pursuing an opportunity at [prospect name] - do you know anyone there?

Is there anyone in your network who would be a great candidate to work here?

How much additional business and positive buzz could you generate if you dedicated a resource to this effort? My guess is that resource would be generating leads to your Sales team within three months and would (more than) pay for itself in the first six months. Sales acceleration can occur via tools and systems but it can also happen as a result of the simple process of people talking to each other and tracking information.

In summary - if you're in professional services, people are your product. And if you're in technology services, you're probably more focused on solution development than product (people) development. I hope my suggestions provided food for thought, and I'd love to hear about what YOUR firm is doing in these areas, or others, to amplify the power of your team.

August 06, 2013

From a news perspective, this story is about changing healthcare practices to reduce costs, and the important role of data in this change. From my perspective, there is a scene-stealer in the story that eclipses those topics.

Brief synopsis: A group of health care providers in Camden, NJ analyzed data about emergency room use with the goal of reducing ER visits by those who didn't actually need emergency care (but rather the regular care of a primary care physician). They mapped hospital billing info and found hotspots within the city of "super users" of the ER. With this information they placed physician's offices directly in those hotspots - sometimes in the same apartment building with the super users. Result: over time, use of these local physician's offices has increased, and ER and inpatient visits have decreased.

Here's the part of the story that struck me:

"Dr. Jon Regis is a longtime member of the Camden coalition. ...Regis says it took longer than he had hoped to win over residents — almost two years. "We thought that since they were having such a difficult time, we could just open up the door and they would come down," he says. "That wasn't the case ... We had to do a number of different things, like health fairs and meet-and-greets. We had to engender a sense of trust in the residents before they would come down to see us," he says. "I think that was somewhat surprising. But we're starting to get past that now." "

Think about this - you have the chance to switch from trekking across town to the ER, where you experience long wait times and where the nurses are sometimes point-blank telling you you shouldn't be, to visiting a doctor just a few floors down in your own building. But you don't do it. There could be any number of reasons behind this - the main point is, even a change that's seemingly a no-brainer requires time and outreach in order to take hold. You need to trust that new system before you will start using it.

This story is a metaphor for practically every SharePoint implementation I've worked on, and I'm guessing it's the case for most IT projects, SharePoint or otherwise. It's not enough to introduce something life-improving and cost-saving to your end users; they need to trust that new system before they will use it, and in order for that to happen, it requires change management, which usually means you need to walk the halls, tell the story, meet the users on their own terms.

Unlike a hospital ER, a company might be able to shut down an old system or restrict access to it, but in my experience companies can't or won't do this, especially with entrenched systems like file shares and email. And if the doors remain open to the old system, without a serious outreach effort (marketing and communications), that convenient new time-saving application may take years to be fully adopted (if ever).

2. Trust Affects Governance, Too!

On a similar theme, last week Atul Gawande published "Slow Ideas" in the New Yorker. In this article he tells the story of how several life-saving innovations progressed through history. Some spread relatively quickly, like the use of anesthesia. Some have taking much more time to spread and be adopted, even though they are generally understood and accepted, like antiseptic behaviors. Gawande looks at the motivations behind the spread of ideas, and different approaches to changing behaviors - one being punishment or disincentives, and the other being incentives and rewards.

This is where the article started to sound like a governance story to me: you have a list of behaviors that you want your workforce to follow, for the good of all. In Gawande's example of reducing infant mortality in developing countries, this list includes handwashing, disinfecting delivery rooms, and keeping the newborn warm. Now, although I'm in no way trying to equate the impact or criticality of a hospital delivery room with an information technology system, in the organizations where I've seen new IT systems implented, there is also typically a list of desired behaviors, which may include the use of naming conventions, granting of permissions and rights based on role or training, and the following of a code of conduct, to name a few.

In both cases, if you ask the practitioners in the system whether they think the list of rules is a good idea, intellectually they would say yes - yet they don't follow them or carry out the steps on a daily basis. Why? To quote Gawande -

"...technology and incentive programs are not enough. “Diffusion is essentially a social process through which people talking to people spread an innovation,” wrote Everett Rogers, the great scholar of how new ideas are communicated and spread. Mass media can introduce a new idea to people. But, Rogers showed, people follow the lead of other people they know and trust when they decide whether to take it up. Every change requires effort, and the decision to make that effort is a social process.

This is something that salespeople understand well. I once asked a pharmaceutical rep how he persuaded doctors—who are notoriously stubborn—to adopt a new medicine. Evidence is not remotely enough, he said, however strong a case you may have. You must also apply “the rule of seven touches.” Personally “touch” the doctors seven times, and they will come to know you; if they know you, they might trust you; and, if they trust you, they will change. That’s why he stocked doctors’ closets with free drug samples in person. Then he could poke his head around the corner and ask, “So how did your daughter Debbie’s soccer game go?” Eventually, this can become “Have you seen this study on our new drug? How about giving it a try?” As the rep had recognized, human interaction is the key force in overcoming resistance and speeding change."

In the article, Gawande gives several examples of how the placing of experienced trainers among the group of people whose behaviors they wanted to change, and bringing them into regular social contact, eventually brought about changes in those behaviors. His article is lengthy but in my opinion well worth the read to get a sense of the scale of the effort that is required to make even small changes that can have tremendous impact.

This is as true for your technology governance and adoption as it is for people in the medical field - your checklist won't be followed, and your system won't be adopted, if you launch it and only provide self-service training. To achieve the successful spread of the change, you need to go out among your user base, not just once but multiple times, subtly reinforcing the message and building trust.

February 28, 2013

Image courtesy of the Ad Generator, which mashes up fragments of real corporate slogans with Flickr images to generate ersatz advertisements on the fly.

OK, perhaps it's not momentous and/or exciting to anyone but me. But today I want to go public with the news that I have taken on the role of Director of Marketing at BlueMetal Architects.

I have already been working in this capacity for several months, and I am absolutely thrilled by this change, which translates my experience helping clients be successful on a project-by-project basis to a comprehensive strategy for driving success and satisfaction across all our clients. I'm working with a much broader spectrum of technologies, where I continue to emphasize strategy and maturity in our solutions, and I'm interacting more closely with the great teams of experts in all our practices and locations. Among many other initiatives, I now have responsibility for focusing on the people at BlueMetal and helping each one of them build their individual brands. And best of all, I get to do all this in an environment that encourages innovation and creativity, where I can continually challenge myself and others to lead with the strength of our differences (rather than trying to mimic our competition). And our differences are VERY strong.

In the past few months, the folks who've learned my news all had similar questions for me. Because I can't resist an opportunity to re-use information, I put together this FAQ.

Why Marketing?

Information Technology welcomed me in when I was young, as it did for so many of us, and I made my career there doing what I'd always been good at - organizing information, simplifying processes, connecting people, surfacing knowledge. But after many years of doing IT work that other people encouraged me to do, I could no longer ignore the signs: in my free time I read Marketing books. Walking into stores with my kids, I talked to them about brand recognition and consumer behavior. I admired logos, labels and packaging for their own sake. I subscribed to technology blogs but I read marketing and design blogs. I envied the Marketing staff at the companies where I worked. I harrassed the company leaders to update the corporate website, start listening via social media, and value thought leadership over brochureware. I worked nights and weekends to build my personal brand in the technology community, and that felt like the most fun part of my work week.

Then, this past Fall, we started interviewing candidates for a Marketing position at BlueMetal. Though the candidates were excellent, I found myself thinking, "They're not saying exactly what I want to hear. I know our company and this business. I can do better." I pitched my plan - and got the job.

It felt like a huge risk at the time - like stepping away from ten years' investment building my resume in a certain direction - but today it feels like one of the best decisions I ever made.

What's going to happen to the SharePoint Maturity Model?

It's alive and well, and with the help of the community I will continue to maintain and improve it, update it for new versions of the product, collect data, and share that data periodically.

Why would you leave the beautiful SharePoint platform and its magnificent community of users and practitioners?

While I'll be doing less hands-on delivery of SharePoint projects, I definitely won't be stepping away from SharePoint or the community. If anything I'll have the latitude to be even more involved in community groups and events, and to continue to offer tools to the community such as the SharePoint Maturity Model.

Is this like the time when that other SharePoint evangelist made a big deal of announcing his retirement from the community, but then never seemed to go away?

No.

Thanks for reading - now go dream at the speed of everything! (I swear by it!)

February 13, 2013

Many thanks to all those who came out last night for the first Boston Women in SharePoint Chapter meeting, and to Leanne Bateman for organizing! We had a great discussion at MeadHall in Cambridge about the reality of being a woman in tech and in SharePoint specifically. As a follow-up I wanted to share some resources that I keep in mind when facing challenging situations at work.

February 11, 2013

A few interesting things have come out on the women in SharePoint / women in tech / women in leadership subject in the past month, and I wanted to share them here:

Last Friday, the Harvard Business Review blog ran the post "How female leaders should handle double standards." "When people are focused on how they are coming across to others — managing their image — they divert their attention away from their larger leadership purpose, are less clear about their goals and less open to learning."

Pam Parker (Women in SharePoint Boston member) wrote a blog on "Real lessons we should be learning from the guys." "Women hold only 25% of the jobs in IT and that rate has been falling since the 1980s. But because of the diverse skillsets needed for SharePoint and the importance of providing collaboration driven solutions, there are a variety of career opportunities for women and we have a wonderful opportunity to develop an increasingly strong female contingency."

The Boston Globe observed "Women Remain Outsiders in Video Game Industry" - "The small pool of women candidates has been a problem for other technology sectors, which in turn has spurred efforts by industry, higher education, and even the Girl Scouts to encourage girls and women to enter so-called STEM fields: science, technology, engineering, and math. Some chief executives at video game companies acknowledge they need more women in the industry, since nearly half the customers are female, and women over 18 are the fastest growing demographic."

"Objectify a Male Tech Writer Day" was launched and then canceled by Leigh Alexander. The goal of the day had been to "highlight by example what a gendered compliment looks like, and to get people talking in a funny and lighthearted way about how these kinds of comments distract from meaningful dialogues and make writers online feel like their point of view is only as relevant as how attractive they are."

Finally - a Boston chapter of Women In SharePoint recently formed; the first meeting will be held tomorrow, Tuesday 2/12/13, at MeadHall in Cambridge at 6 pm. I'll be warming up the meeting with some thoughts on being a woman in the SharePoint community. Last Spring I participated in Softartisans' "Stories from the WIT Trenches" (a GREAT series to read), and since then I have been paying close attention to the local WIT climate. Let me just say, this will be a reality-based get-together, which will NOT include Jazzercise during the breaks. To the women in the regional SharePoint community, I hope to see you there!

November 13, 2012

SPC12 kicked off yesterday with keynotes from Jared Spataro and others. Following are the points I considered most relevant from the keynotes.

Metrics of the conference:10,000 attendees85 countries200 vendors

Spataro led with a nod to the SharePoint Community, mentioning the MVPs, SP Saturdays, and user groups. This was warmly welcomed by the audience (I was watching the Twitter stream as well as listening to audience reaction), but it seemed like a calculated move to show how Microsoft "gets" community.

Documents: - Surface documents regardless of where they are in the hierarchy or in folders - See the security on a document inline - Create a new file in the site without having the Office client - Drag and drop into a library without needing ActiveX controls. - Share content by inviting inline with autocomplete of names, and choice to require sign-in or not - SkyDrive Pro for local access to content

Sites: - See list of sites I'm following - See list of suggested sites to follow (from the FAST recommendation technology) - Immersive mode for fullscreen mobile device viewing ("content only") - Skin sites with drag-and-drop, no CSS editing - Spataro demo-ed the ability to add a picture as a watermarked background in about 2 seconds. - Visualize tasks on sites with the project and task management bar - and an answer for aggregating tasks for all sites - "My Tasks" - all in one place which synchronizes with tasks in Outlook. - Mobile app for the social features - see the content I'm following - downloadable TODAY for Win 7, iPhone & iPad available "early next year."

Yammer: - The message here was that there were three main reasons (and a hidden fourth) why MS acquired Yammer: ○ Best-in-class social ○ Rapid innovation - a "way of life at Yammer" - (will it still be the case now that MS owns them?) ○ Voluntary adoption - helps users "get comfortable with the cloud" ○ "fun bunch of folks" - "a few drinks drinked in between coding" - and they use whiteboards at Yammer! - Adam Pisoni demo-ed the "activity story" - new "post to Yammer" button in the ribbon. Documents shared from SharePoint are visible in Yammer as full-fidelity preview. - Pisoni also demo-ed a "sneak peek" Yammer on Windows 8 in the Modern UI. - Roadmap: SPOnline will include Yammer for free.

Richard Riley then gave the highlights for Search, Web Publishing, and ECM.

Web Publishing: - Use ANY web publisher to edit pages for SP - no longer constrained to using SP Designer. (Live demo got an error from Dreamweaver - to which Riley responded "it always works the second time."

Other notes from today:

On the vendor floor, lots of great examples of community-created content becoming part of the vendor message:

November 12, 2012

The 2012 Microsoft SharePoint Conference kicked off yesterday at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. The theme this year is "Share More, Do More;" in this blog over the nexts few days I'll share a few highlights from each day.

My taxi ride from the airport was a microcosm of the high-caliber attendees of this conference - I shared a van with a SharePoint Product Manager from Microsoft as well as folks from Deloitte, Avanade, and Axceler. Naturally, the ride ended up being sponsored by Axceler (thanks Christian!). I then went to the opening reception from 6-9 pm, and afterwards to a small "ShareSalon" organized by Ruven Gotz and Erica Toelle. Here are my takeaways from today:

1. A Help / Training tool for SharePoint: At the ShareSalon, Sue Hanley and others were strongly recommending Asif Rehmani's VisualSP, a ribbon-based, context-senstitive, on-demand Help feature, that can promote adoption and user satisfaction. These experts have seen how effective it can be with their clients and I'm looking forward to trying it out.

2. A new SharePoint consultancy focused solely on the content experience side of SharePoint: Michal Pisarek and a few others have founded Dynamic Owl, a consulting firm focusing on strategy, business analysis, information architecture, and governance for SharePoint. The fact that a firm of this nature can exist (and thrive) now is one more indicator of the shift toward a more business-aligned, user-oriented approach to this platform (the approach I call Content Experience).

3. The economic flip side of the conference: I just wanted to note that, as the folks from the SharePoint community were socializing at the expo reception last night, many talking about how much business they have (or are trying to get), I spoke to quite a few people from the convention center who were working the reception as waitstaff, bartenders, security, etc. - and the overwhelming theme was the lack of work in Vegas. I don't mean that anyone was complaining - the tone was very much a positive, consistent one of "thank you for being here, thank you for bringing this business." When I joked with one of the bartenders, "I know you say that to all the vendors," he said "No, really, you have gotten us out of the house for four days this week. Thank you." Comments like that and many others I heard, with their underlying message of how much people are NOT able to find work in this city, really point up how lucky the SharePoint folks are to be on the "good" side of a very in-demand technology.

October 15, 2012

With the number of SharePoint Maturity assessments having just reached 300 (by which I mean 300 valid, vetted records from in-person assessments and data from the free online app), I wanted to celebrate by sharing some data about who's taking the assessments.

First, let's look at responses by number of years of use, from one year and under up to ten years:

You can see that responses really start to drop off for 7 years of use and greater. While it's understandable that the product is seeing greater adoption with each version, hence a larger sample size from the more recent years, I would love to have more responses from 7-10 year SharePoint implementations. If you or someone you know falls in this category, please consider taking the no-strings-attached online assessment or contacting me to go through it in person; it will make the data better for everyone!

Next, let's look at responses by industry type:

Way to go Finance and Insurance! I salute you for your efforts to understand your progress with SharePoint, and I hope the assessment is helping all of you in every industry to build your roadmaps!

Now we can slice by the number of IT Support Staff supporting the SharePoint implementation:

And by organization size expressed in number of employees:

And finally by annual budget range:

SharePoint community - what do you think about these numbers? Any surprises? Any additional data you'd like to see? Drop me a comment or catch up with me in person - over the next couple of months I'll be taking the SharePoint Maturity Model to:

July 22, 2012

In February of this year I began to collect data on "annual budget range for SharePoint and SP Projects" as part of SharePoint Maturity assessments. There are now more than 200 assessments which include this data, and I wanted to share the results so far.

It appears that the competencies most obviously affected by budget are the Readiness competencies - Infrastructure and Administration, Staffing and Training, and Customizations (i.e. how customizations to SharePoint are supported).

Here are the numbers (click to enlarge):

Here are just the solution competencies:

And here are the Readiness competencies:

The good news is that more budget gets you a more trustworthy infrastructure and more hands to help. The bad news is that this rising tide isn't lifting all boats. Line items for servers and staff have been around long before SharePoint was a twinkle in Microsoft's eye, so it makes sense that companies would feel comfortable dedicating funds to them. If you want to use your SharePoint platform to automate your business processes or provide an integrated reporting dashboard, you'll need money as well as servers and staff; yet this data indicates that even the highest budgets aren't pushing these projects along. Why?

Looking for answers and resources to share, I searched for information on budgets for SharePoint and justification for SharePoint. I found:

Technical consultants who want to help organizations define their budget for SharePoint

Detailed information on startup costs (initial servers and licensing)

A wide range of project management tools

But I didn't find a lot of helpful information on justifying and budgeting the more complex projects that we hear about so often from vendors, at conferences, in thought leadership from the tech community, and of course from Microsoft. There were a few gems, however, included in the Resources section below.

I'll be at SPTechCon Boston this week to talk more about SharePoint Maturity. If you're planning to be there, I'd love to hear from you why you think the numbers above are the way they are. If not, please comment and let me know what you think, or if you know of a great resource I've missed.